"Тед Чан. Seventy-Two Letters (72 буквы, Рассказ) (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

A man lay face down on the floor in front of the desk, hands tied
behind his back. Stratton immediately approached to check on the man. It
was Benjamin Roth, the kabbalist, and he was dead. Stratton realized
several of the manТs fingers were broken; heТd been tortured before he was
killed.
Pale and trembling, Stratton rose to his feet, and saw that his office
was in utter disarray. The shelves of his bookcases were bare; his books
lay strewn face-down across the oak floor. His desk had been swept clear;
next to it was a stack of its brass-handled drawers, emptied and
overturned. A trail of stray papers led to the open door to his studio; in
a daze, Stratton stepped forward to see what had been done there.
His dexterous automaton had been destroyed; the lower half of it lay on
the floor, the rest of it scattered as plaster fragments and dust. On the
work-table, the clay models of the hands were pounded flat, and his
sketches of their design torn from the walls. The tubs for mixing plaster
were overflowing with the papers from his office.
Stratton took a closer look, and saw that they had been doused with
lamp oil.
He heard a sound behind him and turned back to face the office. The
front door to the office swung closed and a broad- shouldered man stepped
out from behind it; heТd been standing there ever since Stratton had
entered. "Good of you to come," the man said. He scrutinized Stratton with
the predatory gaze of a raptor, an assassin.
Stratton bolted out of the back door of the studio and down the rear
hallway. He could hear the man give chase.
He fled through the darkened building, crossing workrooms filled with
coke and iron bars, crucibles and molds, all illuminated by the moonlight
entering through skylights overhead; he had entered the metalworks portion
of the factory. In the next room he paused for breath, and realized how
loudly his footsteps had been echoing; skulking would offer a better
chance at escape than running. He distantly heard his pursuerТs footsteps
stop; the assassin had likewise opted for stealth.
Stratton looked around for a promising hiding place. All around him
were cast iron automata in various stages of near- completion; he was in
the finishing room, where the runners left over from casting were sawed
off and the surfaces chased. There was no place to hide, and he was about
to move on when he noticed what looked like a bundle of rifles mounted on
legs. He looked more closely, and recognized it as a military engine.
These automata were built for the War Office: gun carriages that aimed
their own cannon, and rapid-fire rifles, like this one, that cranked their
own barrel-clusters. Nasty things, but theyТd proven invaluable in the
Crimea; their inventor had been granted a peerage.
Stratton didnТt know any names to animate the weapon--they were
military secrets--but only the body on which the rifle was mounted was
automatous; the rifleТs firing mechanism was strictly mechanical. If he
could point the body in the right direction, he might be able to fire the
rifle manually.
He cursed himself for his stupidity. There was no ammunition here.
He stole into the next room.
It was the packing room, filled with pine crates and loose straw.